


Delirium

by inveigler81



Category: Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-21
Updated: 2016-11-21
Packaged: 2018-09-01 09:29:51
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,039
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8619040
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/inveigler81/pseuds/inveigler81
Summary: Spike and Xander on the road together in the wake of vampires overrunning and seizing control of the country, if not the world. Written for Apocalyptothon.





	

The pain never ended. 

“Where are we heading?” he asked, voice coming thick and groggy. His eye swam from the stab in his skull and what little light filtered through the blacked-out windows. 

“You care?” Spike barely made it a question, swerving to avoid some hazard in the road. For all that was visible, it could’ve been a shadow. Then again, it might’ve been livestock, a sound like a receding bell coming over the ever present growl of the engine. 

“Not really,” he sighed and slumped even lower in the seat, pulling the blanket up around himself. He shivered at the cold from without while squirming in the sweaty soak from within. The car stank. Old food, unwashed bodies, stale alcohol, cigarette ash, blood and sex. Also, something like sour milk. 

“North,” Spike grunted, one eye on the impression of a road, the other on lighting a cigarette. The smoke drifts eerie tendrils, slithering around Xander’s feverish face. 

“Why?” 

“Because I always fancied trying my hand as a sodding lumberjack. Because I fucking feel like it, that’s why,” Spike dismissed him. Everything in Xander hurt. He was inwardly amazed he even had enough blood left to form bruises. What of him hadn’t been ravaged by Spike’s fangs had been plenty ravaged in other ways. 

“Fine.” He tried to shift so that the knuckle bruise to one kidney and the bite to the opposing shoulder wouldn’t press white points of light into his mind at the same time. 

“We’re low on gas. There’s a station comin’ up, you good for it?” Another non-question as the brakes complained and the world swerved to the right. He knew there must’ve been a reason for Spike to leave him enough to be awake. 

“Do I have a choice?” It would’ve been a complaint a month ago, now his voice just sounded hollow and tired and weak. He closed his eye and tried to avoid the gnawing knowing that he was, in fact, hollow and tired and weak. 

~ 

The light was like a hammerblow, even as wan and grey as it was. Xander lurched out of the car, dragging a rifle they’d looted from a store with him and reeled sideways into a fuel pump. 

“How many fucking times?!” Spike snapped at him as he lunged out a blanket-swathed hand to yank the car door closed. His opaque skin crackled and smouldered, adding new smoke to mingle in with the Marlboro. 

It was like a fever dream, everything washed out and overexposed. His life was lived in snatches now, falling out of stolen cars at random and, preferably, deserted gas stations across the country. Doing it in daylight limited the possible damage to a wary survivor putting a bullet in Xander. Trying it by night usually meant wading into one side or other of the civil war. There was no north/south divide, unless you were speaking of celestial planes – in those terms, my how the South had risen again. 

Nothing happened the way it was supposed to. Buffy wasn’t meant to die. Vampires weren’t supposed to get organised. They weren’t supposed to infiltrate, to strategise, to think about the big picture. The young and the reckless and the feral made for the perfect distraction, probably something like the new underclass by now, the rung above food. It was all very ‘Project Mayhem’ or more, ‘I Am Legend’ – the book, not the vague mess of a film. 

He smiled weakly at the analogy. The unbearable weight of the rifle over the ache of his shoulder. The worn-out wreck of a car. All he needed was a dog. 

“Can we hurry this up?!” 

Of course Spike already had one. 

The gas fumes made the icy air waiver, his boots crunching on a layer of frost. He let out a long, foggy breath and looked around at the desolate outskirts of what was once a town. What might still be a town a few hours from now for all he knew. A light dusting of snow was filtering down, flecks of ash winging their way in between. 

“Something’s burning,” he winced as he slid back into the passenger seat. 

“No shit,” Spike scowled at him, holding up the blistering back of a hand. “Close the fucking door already!” 

~ 

“It wasn’t meant to be like this,” Xander complained, sunk in a lawn chair at a rickety cardtable in the basement of who-knew-where. A lone bulb painted things in orbits of yellow and black. 

“Great. Another night of listening to your bloody whining,” Spike muttered and rubbed the heel of a hand into a tired eye, pouring them each enormous measures of scotch. 

“As opposed to what? Drinking ourselves into an angry stupor until we try to kill each other, or fuck each other, or both?” Xander countered, shoving the glass back across the table, it’s contents slopping onto the surface. 

“How was it ‘meant’ to be then, eh? She saves the world for the umpteenth time, comes to her senses and you ride off into the sunset for your happily ever after? Sorry to tell you this, but there were a few other dance partners lined up on that card of hers ahead of you – even a girl or two of late, from what I hear,” he broke off from his mockery with an almost wistful expression. “Sorry I wasn’t around for that.” 

“Screw you Spike.” 

“No, you’re right, that part usually happens later.” 

“Funny,” he muttered, one wasted arm clutching at the other. The house still had hot water, a shower seeming a mercy until it highlighted how little damage could be washed away. How much dried blood ran red again in the water. It still felt like there were knives in his temples. His tongue tasted like acid. 

“No, it’s not funny. It’s fucking pathetic,” 

“You said it,” Xander replied with all the bitterness he had the energy for. 

“No, I mean you pal. One eye and you’re more desperate to see straight than ever. You never wondered why it always took the girls in your life to take you in hand? Those nights you came sniffing around the basement shitfaced drunk when you were scared none of your builder buddies’d wanna play Brokeback. That’s without even mentioning the months you spent as Drac’s little bitch boy,” Spike goaded him, searching for a truth that would provoke the reaction he wanted. Anger that would become something else. 

“Why bother keeping me around then?” He asked, too tired to rise to the bait. 

“You’re a happy meal with legs mate. ‘sides, you have your uses,” Spike shrugged in response. 

“Why’d you even take me out of there in the first place?” Flickers of memories. Plans gone horribly awry. Blood. Bodies. Bodies rent apart like Renee. Bodies like Buffy’s. 

“We’ve been through this a thousand times. I came looking for her and all I could find was what was left of you, the psychotic bookworm and a crater the size of Ohio that I think used to be Red. Still, maybe she’ll pop up again a few hundred years from now to herald your salvation.” The prickling kept up, coming from the last person Xander had expected to drag him from that mangle by the hair. There was nothing left of his squad, his legion. He was sure there were still others, but killing Buffy was killing the shepherd. Third time was a charm. 

“I don’t need saving, and I don’t need you.” He’d needed to be held. What he got was a fractured jaw. 

“Really? Not what I recall you saying the last time you sucked me off. Though, in point of fact, you did have to go and start crying. Quite the little killjoy pansy aren’t you?” Xander lunged at him, more out of habit than an actual reaction, table and glasses careening aside. 

“That’s more like it,” Spike breathed as he bound up an arm and slammed his head against the wall. 

“I hate you,” Xander spat back, little conviction in the bile. He never asked him to stop. 

“That’s what makes this so entertaining.” Needlepoints raised droplets of blood from an old neck wound as belts and denim gave way to icy hands of steel. 

“Why not just kill me?” He said it with something like longing as another ache ran through his whole form. The sex wasn’t even a kindness, let alone in the realms of affection. It was more a form of piteous self-destruction than anything else. 

“You’re the last game in town,” And then Spike was inside him – mind, body, blood and all. 

~

Neither of them fit anywhere anymore. Spike wasn’t willing to be party to some grand new regime - ‘I didn’t become a vampire to carry a fucking union card’ was his current catchcry. Nor did he have any desire to fight. To him, Xander was a final fragment of a life long gone. His ego the more wounded that his legend had vanished into obscurity - ‘William the Bloody’, killer of two slayers, second-string vampire with a soul, was no longer the biggest of bads, not when the world was ending. 

Xander was little more than a wraith now, a sketch of an idea of who he once might’ve been. He had no desire for the company of people, for the plight of the resistance - all he’d ever had to fight for was already lost. He definitely had no wish to be sired - with nothing to live for, why live forever? 

So there they were, clinging to each other in the wreckage. Each merely served as a reflection to give the other an identity. Something punchdrunk to pick at, Xander’s blood barely enough to keep coursing through the both of them. 

Spike had the capacity for beauty in him at times, like the quiet of an ocean between squalls. Some mornings when Xander’s husk hardly drew breath, he’d see him sat naked, smoking and reading. A carved white angel, for want of a better word, drinking coffee enlivened with whatever whisky he could find, provided it wasn’t Irish. It was easy to forget he’d been a starry-eyed young artist once and as hard to imagine him being brutalised by Angelus, as fierce a thing as he’d come to be. 

~ 

“Why North?” Xander tried again, crumpling up the map Spike had thrust at him hours ago. It was early evening and they’d been driving most of the day. 

“Stays dark longer, doesn’t it,” 

“I thought you didn’t wanna mingle,” 

“I don’t, but the longer it’s dark, the more in the way of breathing room I have to make my own arrangements,” Spike’s voice became exasperated, he loathed explanation. 

The engine made screeching noises of complaint akin to those in Xander’s head, then it died. The car coasted to a reluctant, sputtering stop. 

“Looks like we’re walking then,” Spike muttered while cursing. 

“Seriously?” Xander sounded incredulous, his whole body feeble. 

“Oh no, you’re right, perhaps we should try hitchhiking.” Piercing eyes settled on him, “Just see if it’s dark enough yet,” he ordered. 

They set off up the road at a steady, trudging pace, Xander tottering from side to side and using the rifle as a cane as best he could. The chill wind whipped fresh snow all around them, his body soaked from feverish sweat before it could make a blind bit of difference. As it grew darker they could make out lights up ahead, buildings and the distant promise of noise. Closer still and they could make out the silhouettes of sentries. They stood openly in the street, unphased by the inclement weather. 

“I’d toss that if I were you,” Spike nodded at the rifle. 

“Why?” 

“I don’t think they’ll approve of pets being armed, do you?” 

Sure enough, those stationed at the town entrance were vampires. Well dressed and equally well armed. The strip beyond them looked like any other bustling little town on a Saturday night, free of carnage or burning wreckage. One of them eyed Xander closely as they approached. 

“Evening gents,” Spike opened. 

“If you’re looking to sell or peddle…that, you’ll need to take it down to Freemont,” One of them spoke to Spike as if Xander wasn’t even there. 

“Freemont?” Spike asked 

“Where the feeding houses are, we try to keep this place as clean as we can but we gotta give the whores somewhere to operate,” the other one put in, leering at Xander and seeming to scent his crusted blood on the air. 

“Of course,” Spike agreed flatly. 

“You planning on staying long?” The lead guard questioned him as Spike went to move past them. 

“No, no. Just passing through. Need to pick up a little travelling money and a fresh set of wheels,” He grinned savagely and clapped a hand on Xander’s shoulder. The iron grip dragged and steered him on into the town, leaving the guards chuckling behind them. 

“Keep out of trouble,” one of the guards called after him. 

“Do I ever,” Spike muttered under his breath. 

“Why don’t you just get me a collar and a leash?” Xander coughed, his chest racked with the onset of a cold, or possibly death. They were most likely the same thing, weak as he was. 

“Don’t tempt me,” 

“What’s the plan?” 

“Plan? Well I for one intend on getting myself a decent meal, ‘borrowing’ another automobile and then getting the fuck out of dodge,” 

“Meal?” 

“Yes dear, I’m sorry to tell you this, but you’re starting to get a little gamey,” Spike taunted him as he strode that cocksure swagger down the street. He stopped on a dime to ask a pair of passing vampires directions. 

~ 

Xander slumped against the brickwork and slid down to the ground, no longer really feeling the cold seeping into him from all sides. Spike had deposited him outside something that resembled a tumbledown crackhouse, produced a wad of bills he’d taken from a gas station register and disappeared inside. 

Xander sat there, feeling pangs of something like abandonment or resentment, or maybe even jealousy. He didn’t know how long he sat there before she came, or before he was aware of her. She looked like her in the dark, little and toned and blonde. Of course the nose wasn’t right. 

“How much?” She asked. 

He shook his head wordlessly and craned his neck to the side, offering the less mutilated of his arteries. She didn’t need a second invitation. And then he was up and flying, cradled in her arms, his mind slipping away and lost forever in the smell of her hair. 

“Oi! Fuck off slag, that’s mine!” A voice rang from a light year away. And then he was falling back to earth, and she was gone again and forever dead. He lay in the gutter, looking up through the slit of an eye. 

“It offered it up!” the vampire railed at Spike. 

“That your thing is it, love? Picking up bled-dry, back alley castoffs for free?” 

“I got rights here! We started a transaction that…” 

“A tran…what?! I don’t know what the fuck you lot have going on here, but I do know that I’m not about to stand here and debate the finer points of the legality of dinner. I’m taking my…that…and we’re leaving. Now, unless you’d like to spend the rest of eternity as grit on this particular sidewalk, I’d fuck off,” 

“Y’know what? Fuck you! I’m calling the enforcers!” With that she took off toward the main street. 

“I can’t take you anywhere,” Spike spat at him as he cast up and down the grimy little back road. Settling on a nearby pickup, he smashed the window with his elbow. 

Xander lay still, in full expectation of watching him drive away. Instead he strode back across the street and hefted his ragdoll form into the cab before climbing in himself. Keys fell jangling from behind a sun-visor and the familiar constant of a throaty engine roar returned to Xander’s mind. 

“Of course, now we’ll need to find something better on up the road. One without the benefit of open air ventilation and we’ll need more paint…” Spike began rattling off as they tore out of the town, hounded by shouts and the whistle of projectiles. Xander couldn’t keep from laughing, as much as it hurt. “What could possible be funny?” 

“You…planning your survival…” he wheezed as stars wheeled past and his mind went blank. 

~

Xander woke up alone in the passenger seat of a completely different car. It was parked in what looked like a basement parking garage and he had no idea where he was. The windows had been freshly blacked out and the fumes made his eye sting. He barely had the energy to move. He propped his head against the stickiness of the window and fumbled with his eye-patch where it bit into the socket. A stairwell door clashed open somewhere and Spike came stalking across the lot, shopping bags in hand. He cast them into the backseat and then made to pull out. 

“Finally decided to grace me with your presence then? Nearly left you for dead, two towns back,” he remarked as they snaked up through several parking levels and out into a clear winter night. 

“Wha…where was that?” His throat burned and his lips felt dry and cracked. 

“Little supply stop. Now it can truly be said that corporate America is the tool of the underworld. Though it has to be said that the minimum wage undead aren’t any more helpful than the living,” 

“What’d you want?” 

“Guns, meat – the essentials of pioneer life,” 

“Meat?” 

“You’d be amazed how many of you they have strung up by the toes in the walk-ins back there,” 

“I don’t even want to know if you’re joking,” he sighed and closed his eye again. 

~ 

He came around again feeling more awake and less drained than he had in weeks. His head and body still screamed at him more than ever, but that was an assurance that feeling had momentarily returned. He was laid out on a bed and the salivating smell of onions and seering beef reached his nostrils. Steadying himself against a wall, he limped out of the bedroom and down a hallway towards a kitchen. Spike was cooking at a grill and swigging from a bottle of red. 

“What the fuck is this?” Xander slurred, slouching down at a breakfast bar and laying his head on the mosaic surface. 

“Dinner, what the fuck does it look like?” 

“Why the desire to play Suzie Homemaker all of a sudden?” 

“Hey, if anybody’s the housebound bitch in this setup, we know who that is.” 

“Fuck you.” 

“Too easy,” Spike sneered at him. “It would seem that you need something in the way of replenishment.” 

“Aw, gee, it almost sounds like you care.” 

“I do, I couldn’t have filled a shotglass with what you had left after you deciding to go and play Midnight Cowboy.” 

“Go to hell.” 

“Undoubtedly, but first you can shut up and eat your fucking steak,” he commanded as he slapped down a plate with a steaming slab of meat on it. He even proceeded to slice it into manageable chunks, most likely to watch the blood flow than to afford Xander any help. The first pieces made him gag, but then a ravenous appetite well and truly took hold. 

“This my last meal?” 

“Not quite,” Spike’s answer was oddly distant. 

The food made him crash. He woke back in the bed, Spike propped up next to him, reading, smoking, drinking. 

“What?” he questioned Xander’s expression without looking up from the page. 

“Y’know, you let me recover too much and I’ll stake you in your sleep.” The threat was utterly empty and Spike knew it. 

“You’d eat a bullet more like,” he waved him off. 

Xander moved to open the front of Spike’s faded black jeans. 

“You don’t have to do that you know,” his eyes lifting a beat from the book. 

“You think I don’t know that?” 

They actually talked afterwards. Drank wine, smoked, played cards. It was the closest thing to the same universe as pleasant as Xander could recall in outside a year, which was the far side of forever by now. Quiet music strained from the stereo as they sat together in the dark. 

‘…all I have left, is my memories of yesterday…’ 

“Jesus, Bristol was fucking depressing enough before this shite,” Spike muttered. “Try and find something a little more upbeat for the road would you? See if they’ve got any Stones, or the Pistols, hell – I’ll even take the Ramones.” 

~ 

The sky was briefly blue as they headed out the next day. They hadn’t gone half a mile when a ringing shot did something to one of the front wheels, the car fitting and pirouetting into a rock or a barrier or a tree. 

“Out of the vehicle! Do it now!” A voice ordered from a distance. Spike swaddled himself in more blanket and nodded to him, his brow bleeding from where it had struck the wheel. 

Xander cracked the door and stepped out, palms raised. He made a poor enough impression at night, let alone in the cold light of day, exposed flesh riddled with holes. 

“It’s ok…” His voice croaked. There were three of them that he could see, camouflaged grey and white against the snowdrifts, weapons trained. 

“How many of them in the vehicle?” Another voice shouted its demand. 

“I…no….it’s ok…” Xander tried again, his head throbbing. He looked back in at Spike. 

“Your call, though it’s a touch sunny for me to go all Butch and Sundance by your side,” he stated evenly. Xander’s head made a wavering nod. Conflicting orders rained down at him from the bend in the road. 

“Step away from the vehicle!” 

“On the ground!” 

“Do it now!” 

Xander leant back into the car and took the handgun from the glove compartment. 

“Not a good idea,” Spike contributed. Xander just smiled. 

He barely got the weight of the revolver to shoulder height before the shot cut through his chest. He heard the report after his head struck the side of the rear door and then the blacktop. He knew it was done from the cold, white burrow of pain and the attempt at a gushing font of scarlet. He smiled up at the leaden sky. He definitely didn’t have enough blood for that. 

More yelling. Cold white hands snatched at him and wrenched him back into the car, even as the windshield fractured into a crystalline spider’s web and shots sunk hard into metal. Impacts of shattering glass landed near by, mixed with the stink of alcohol and gas, flames leaping up not far behind. Everything seemed inappropriately funny, bleeding out was one thing, frothy red bubbles were another. 

“After…all these years…put down by a person…” Xander managed. 

“Think you needed to be a little quicker on the draw there, Billy,” Spike remarked, keeping his head down and binding more swaddling around his head. 

“You want this? Shame…for it to go…to waste,” Xander did his best to proffer his seeping chest to him. For the first time that he could remember, Spike looked disgusted. 

“No…you’re alright,” his voice low, as he took the gun from Xander’s grasp and checked its contents. 

“Never would’ve…guessed…I’d wind up bleeding to death in a…burning car…with you….” he wheezed. A hot trickle ran from his mouth, something thick and metal in his throat. 

“Speak for yourself. Think I can make the treeline?” Spike asked, voice flat. 

“There isn’t…a treeline…” Xander would’ve laughed again if the agony wasn’t unbearable. 

“You’re a fucking idiot you know that? Why didn’t you just give me up?” 

“Because…you’re the only…one left…who knows enough…to care,” he managed to struggle out. 

“Feeling’s mutual, Xander,” Spike’s voice as close to feeling as he would ever hear. His vision was far away already, world seen through a pinpoint. “Wish me luck,” Spike breathed and shouldered open the driver’s door. Xander liked to think he might’ve looked back, as his breath gave out and the world went dark. 

The pain finally went away.


End file.
